


on distant worlds

by asael



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space, First Kiss, Getting Together, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-18 03:42:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13091688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asael/pseuds/asael
Summary: A chance trip to a mysterious uninhabited world forces Adam to finally confront the feelings he's been dancing around for months. Now if only he can manage to fix Gansey's stupid ship engine and get them to safety, too...(Space AU)





	on distant worlds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mletart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mletart/gifts).



> This was written for mletart (mletart.tumblr.com) for the 2017 Pynch Secret Santa exchange! I loved your prompts and had ideas for all of them, but this is the one that really inspired me. I hope you like it, and have a lovely Christmas!

Adam leans back on his heels, shoving the engine plating back into place. There’s oil and grease on his hands now, and probably smeared along his face where he wiped some sweat away earlier. He sighs in tired acceptance, uncurling himself from the awkward, mildly uncomfortable position he had to stay in to get anything done.

The engine room of Gansey’s CVC-700R4 is small, cramped, and offers very little in the way of ventilation. That’s as to be expected from an out-of-date (well, Gansey would say ‘classic’) sports model, of course. Gansey’s ship - affectionately called ‘The Pig’ - wasn’t meant for more than pleasure cruises when it was built, and now, years down the line, it requires extra TLC just to stay running consistently.

But Gansey loves it, and Adam’s developed some kind of Stockholm Syndrome-esque affection for its little difficulties and idiosyncrasies, so the hours spent in the cramped engine room are almost worth it.

Also, if he doesn’t they’ll all die in the vast coldness of space. So there’s that.

But now he’s covered in grease again, and even though it’s only his friends on this ship, Adam still doesn’t like being seen like this. It’s too much like the old days, when all he could do was repair old ships on a backwater planet, try to avoid his father’s anger, and dream of the stars.

It’s all over now, but some things stay with you.

Adam collects the tools he was using, putting them away neatly. He’s careful about organization down here - it would be easy to lose something important, or to clutter the small space to the point that it’s impossible to work. When Gansey comes down to watch him work or to attempt repairs himself, things usually end in chaos, and so Adam does a bit of extra housekeeping to avoid that when it’s just him.

He hears the hatch open behind him, a loud creak in the small room, and makes a mental note that the hinges could use oil. Though he expects Gansey’s bright eyes and encouraging smile, it’s Ronan who steps through the doorway instead.

Ronan Lynch couldn’t be more different than Gansey, all sharp and unwelcoming, shaved head and lean muscles and couple inches of height on Adam. He’s wearing all black, like always, and he’s scowling, like always.

When they first met, Adam was deeply wary of Ronan. Ronan went out of his way to be intimidating, to plaster danger signs across every inch of himself, and Adam had lived too many years with an angry man to ignore those danger signs. But he’s been with Gansey for months now - almost a year, he realizes with surprise - and things have changed.

Oh, Ronan is dangerous. But the danger of him is not bruises and careless fists, unhinged anger and violence. The danger is that he’s so much more than he pretends to be, and as those layers have shown themselves, Adam has been drawn deeper and deeper.

It was Ronan’s loyalty to Gansey, at first, that eased Adam’s wariness. Gansey had shown himself to be trustworthy and friendly, determined and dependable, and Adam was taken in by it - how could he not be? But Adam was observant too - he always has been - and so he saw how Ronan was just as taken in, with the added familiarity of an old friendship, trust and inside jokes and irritation tempered by affection. He thought, then, that Ronan might be all right.

Which was good, because at that point Adam had already been involved in a family-ending confrontation with his father, been injured, been thrown out, and accepted an unexpected offer to be part of Gansey’s crew. To explore the galaxy in search of the long-missing explorer and commander, Glendower, who Gansey is deeply obsessed with.

And then he got to visit the stars he’d dreamed of, and Ronan Lynch was something he had to learn to live with regardless of their feelings about each other.

It had turned out all right. It _is_ all right. Over the past months, Adam has grown to see Ronan as his own person, rather than simply Gansey’s brilliant pilot, a complicated and irritating and fierce person who Adam might be annoyed by sometimes, but -

But.

Well, Ronan’s not so bad.

Chainsaw flutters in through the open doorway, too, her four wings settling against her back as she lands on Ronan’s shoulder, her prehensile tail slicing through the air. Ronan picked her up on a world they visited some months ago, fallen from her mother’s nest after it had been attacked by a predator. Now she is - this. Beautiful, strange, impossible. Just like Ronan.

“Done?” Ronan asks, looking around the engine room as if he has any idea of how it works.

“Yeah,” Adam says, closing his toolbox. “We need a new compressor, but this one will hold until we can get to Aglionby Station, as long as we don’t do anything too crazy.” He raises an eyebrow at Ronan, who grins.

“Don’t worry, Parrish. Gansey’s letting Blue drive for now. We’re probably all gonna die of old age before we get to the station, anyway.”

Adam hides his own smile. They all need to be able to pilot the Pig, in case of emergency, even if Ronan is the best of them - but Blue has never quite taken to it. She flies as slow as possible, plotting out her route with incredible precision and care, as if the slightest mistake will send them straight into the sun.

It drives Ronan crazy, and he won’t stay in the cockpit while she’s flying. Adam thinks it’s kind of cute, but he knows better than to say so. Blue would gut him and use his intestines as shoelaces, probably. Besides, everyone knows Gansey is more than happy to keep her company up there so they can exchange longing looks and fill the cockpit with sexual tension.

Maybe Adam will wait a bit before he delivers the news about the compressor. Give them a little more time.

“Don’t know how you can stand it in here,” Ronan says. “It smells like grease and burning plastic.” His eyes catch on a spot on Adam’s jaw, and Adam knows instantly that he’s got oil there. Self-conscious, he scrubs it away with the sleeve of his shirt. Ronan always seems to notice these things.

“That’s the compressor,” he says. “Normally a burning smell is a bad thing, you know.”

Ronan scowls at him, because they both know Adam is talking about the month before, when Ronan accidentally-on-purpose burned a pair of Gansey’s favorite shoes in the ship galley and tried to convince everyone it was just dinner burning. He scowls, but the corners of his mouth twitch.

It _was_ pretty funny. It also got Ronan off cooking rotation for a couple weeks, which was good for everyone. He tends to get creative, and while Adam sometimes appreciates that, not everyone does. 

Ronan is opening his mouth, probably to say something shitty or funny, or both, when the speaker next to them emits a staticky burst. It’s nothing, and then it’s words.

“Hey, guys,” Noah says, an undercurrent of excitement in his voice. “Gansey and I found something. Come on up to the cockpit, I think we’re gonna land.”

Adam and Ronan exchange a glance. That could mean a lot of things, but for Adam it’s practicality he jumps to first. They can probably land and take off again safely, but with the compressor on its last legs, they shouldn’t. But if Gansey really has found something… well, it’s not likely Adam will be able to convince him not to.

As they head up to the cockpit, he catalogs their inventory. He has enough parts to jury-rig the engine, if he needs to, and Henry should still be meeting them at Aglionby Station. Though unable to avoid family responsibilities and travel with Gansey’s crew like he wishes, he meets up with them when he can and supplies parts and other necessities. Gansey is, of course, disgustingly rich - they don’t need Henry’s money. But parts for CVC-700R4 models are hard to come by, and with Gansey’s quest at the forefront, Adam doesn’t have the leisure of hunting for them.

Henry does, or at least he has men he can pay to do it. If Adam can keep them flying until the station, he’ll be able to get replacement parts, so… maybe this stop won’t be a terrible idea. Maybe they won’t all end up stranded on some empty planet.

Well, he can hope, anyway.

When they get to the cockpit, Gansey’s excitement is impossible to miss. He always gets this way when he finds a clue, another breadcrumb that might lead him to the final resting place of Glendower. The legend says he’s not dead, just in cryo-sleep somewhere, and while Adam doubts that’s possible he knows Gansey believes it wholeheartedly. So they search, and it’s - well. It’s friendship, and adventure, and a future he never believed he would have. It’s worth it.

Blue’s eyes are on the controls, but she glances over for a moment and raises her hand in hello before focusing her attention again. Noah, of course, isn’t there.

Artificial intelligences aren’t illegal anymore, but they are extremely rare. Leave it to Gansey to somehow find one of the few remaining AI from before the ban, one of the few who hadn’t been completely destroyed, and install it in his ship. Gansey, after all, is a connoisseur of outcasts, and Noah is as much a part of the crew as any of them, AI or not.

Adam remembers the first time Noah spoke to him, not long after he joined Gansey’s crew. He thought for a moment, impossibly, that the ship was haunted. The truth - that there was an AI watching over them all - didn’t feel any less impossible, but it was still the truth. 

“Noah was combing through the star charts,” Gansey says. “The historical ones we picked up last month, remember? And he found something.”

The speaker crackles as Noah speaks. He doesn’t sound like a computer - he never has. He sounds like a young man, around their age, energetic and friendly. “Yeah! It wasn’t obvious at first, because there’s no official record of it, but we already knew Glendower’s ship came through this sector. I found a log entry from someone trying to mine one of the asteroids around here saying that the ship stopped, that they sent something like maybe a probe down to the surface of one of the planets. They kept going, so nothing was there I guess, but if we could find the probe -”

“It could tell us what Glendower was doing here,” Gansey finishes the thought, eyes bright. “And we may have found something on the planet’s surface. An odd signal - you ought to take a look, Adam.”

Obligingly, Adam peers at the screen. He’s not sure exactly _what_ he’s looking at, but it’s something. It’s not a signal, like from a probe or an outpost, but it’s definitely odd. 

The rest of the planet looks bare. No breathable atmosphere (at least not by humans), no apparent life. But there’s something there, a small area that’s giving off some sort of - radiation, maybe?

“It might be a geological event,” Adam says, because he doesn’t want to get Gansey’s hopes up if it’ll just be a disappointment. And it’s true. It might. None of them are trained in these things - Adam’s speciality is engineering, Ronan is a pilot, Blue’s area of expertise is botany and common sense. Even Noah was originally designed for entertainment, not data analysis, and Gansey - well, Gansey leads them. That is, in and of itself, a rare skill. 

But it does mean they have no one adept at reading and interpreting signals and data like this. Adam has been trying to learn in his free time, but progress is slower than he’d like. It could be anything, really, or nothing at all. The only way to know is to check it out.

“We’ll land and go out and take a look. If it’s nothing, we’ll leave again - it really isn’t that far out of the way.” Gansey is looking at them like any of them might say no, when he should know by now that they never would.

“Just don’t let Sargent crash the ship,” Ronan says with a shrug. He never calls it his ship, pilot though he may be. Adam knows that he has a ship of his own, sleek and expensive and fast, that he left with his brothers when he followed Gansey. He wonders, sometimes, what it felt like to leave all that behind.

It was not easy for him, and he left nothing important, nothing that had ever loved him. Ronan left family, and more. Realizing that was one of the things that began to change the way Adam views Ronan.

A bright smile flashes across Gansey’s face. “Take us down, Jane.”

Halfway to the ground, the compressor goes out again.

Adam can feel it, from the way the ship moves, limping through the sky like a bird with a broken wing. Blue’s eyes are wide in panic. Ronan unbuckles himself from one of the passenger seats and scrambles to the pilot’s chair, taking the controls from her. It’s a testament to the difficulty and fear of the moment that she doesn’t fight him, doesn’t even protest - simply removes herself from the pilot chair, face pale. Ronan’s hands on the controls are more sure, but even he is tense.

“Just get us down,” Adam says. “I can fix it once we’re on the ground.” He hopes he’s not lying.

It’s touch-and-go, but even Ronan’s worst enemies would have to grudgingly admit that he’s one of the best pilots in the quadrant. He gets them down safely, though the landing is harder and bumpier than any of them would like, and Adam spares a moment of worry for the landing gear. There will be more than one repair to make when they get to the station. If they get there.

“Fuck,” Ronan says once they land. He turns to Adam. Once, Adam would have thought the look in his eyes was anger, but now he knows it’s concern. “This piece of shit spaceship.”

“Ronan,” Gansey says reprovingly, because the Pig is his baby.

“I can fix it,” Adam says again, with confidence. It’s false confidence, and he thinks Ronan knows that, but he accepts it anyway. 

“There’s a storm coming,” Noah says, concern in his artificial voice. “Guys, we only have a few hours before it gets here. My calculations give us only a little longer after that before it’s too bad to take off.”

“How long will the storm last?” Gansey asks, forehead wrinkling in worry.

“No idea,” Noah says. “Probably at least a day. Maybe more.”

It is not good news. If they’d landed with the engine intact, it wouldn’t have mattered, but with the repairs they need... Adam makes a quick decision, the only one he can think of. “Go look for that signal. I’ll stay here - by the time you’re back, we’ll be ready to go.”

Ronan scowls a little, and Gansey looks distressed, but they agree. It feels odd even to Adam, sitting out on one of their expeditions, but he doesn’t know how long the repairs will take. He doesn’t want them to end up stuck here. They’re already running low on supplies, intending to stock up with Henry at Aglionby Station. He wishes he’d known about the storm before they landed, but that is the danger of doing system-wide explorations in a ship built to be a pleasure craft. The sensors just aren’t built for that kind of thing, and Noah, incredible as he might be, isn’t built to do those sorts of calculations.

Usually it’s fine. Sometimes, they run into situations like these.

Adam watches them suit up. The atmosphere seems to be mainly carbon dioxide, so they’ll need suits and masks. Blue catches his eye and smiles, the excitement of exploration already in her eyes. She looks lovely.

“Don’t worry, Adam. I’ll keep both of these idiots from doing anything too stupid.”

Ronan snorts and rolls his eyes. “You’ll be doing it right alongside us, maggot.”

Adam finds himself smiling despite his worry. He wishes he were going with them. “Just don’t anger any local wildlife, all right?” Another sideways reference to a past misdeed of Ronan’s, and this one just makes Ronan smile at him, fierce and bright. Adam’s chest feels tight with worry, with something else.

He watches them go, watches them walk off into the strange barren landscape of this small planet. He will see them again, he knows, but for a moment he is afraid.

Then he gets to work.

The compressor is almost entirely shot, and Adam has to do a cunning series of jury-rigs involving duct tape, a disassembled metal cup from the kitchen, and rubber from a spare hose. Chainsaw oversees his work, chirping and pecking at his tools. Adam doesn’t have the heart to shoo her away and shut her out of the engine room. He wants the company, anyway.

Noah plays music through the speakers, peppy and fast-paced, more appropriate to a dance party than to being stranded on an empty planet with his friends missing. But that’s something of a comfort, too, another reminder that Adam isn’t alone. His companions might be an AI and an eerie alien bird, but he isn’t alone.

By the time he’s finished the repairs, he can hear the wind outside rising. Not much, not enough to worry, but it means the edge of the storm is nearly here. 

His friends aren’t back.

Adam tries to swallow down the worry. Nothing has happened to them, they took more than enough oxygen to get there and back. Despite his comment to Ronan earlier, they don’t have any reason to believe there’s any wildlife on the planet, much less anything dangerous.

He thinks of rockfalls, lightning strikes, a wrong footstep on the edge of a cliff. A thousand other things that could have happened.

“Noah,” he says, “has Gansey tried to get in contact with us?”

“The storm’s interfering with the radio,” Noah says. “I can’t reach them.”

Which is pretty much the last thing Adam wants to hear. He makes a decision, right then. “I’m going out to look for them.”

He has the coordinates they were heading for. He’ll probably run into them on their way back, and if not - well.

Maybe he can help. It’s better than sitting here and driving himself insane with worry, anyway.

Noah doesn’t try to stop him. Adam thinks he might be worried as well. He hurries down to the airlock, and is halfway into his suit when Blue and Gansey stumble in. At first, Adam feels a surge of relief, but then the door closes behind them, and it’s just the two of them.

Ronan is nowhere to be seen.

“What happened?” Adam says, hands still on the fastenings of his suit.

“We didn’t find anything,” Blue says, disappointment in her voice overlaid with worry. “And the storm - we got separated from Ronan. It’s hard to see out there.”

“He’ll be here,” Gansey says, trying to sound certain, but Adam can hear the worry in his voice, too. “Our radios might be down, but the ship’s beacon is still active. Our suits locked onto it easily - that’s how we got back. Ronan will be able to, as well.”

Unless his suit had been damaged. Unless he’d gotten injured somehow. Unless - 

There were too many possibilities.

“I’ll go out and find him,” Adam says. “My suit hasn’t been touched - I have fresh oxygen. I’m sure he’s nearby.” He is not sure of any such thing. He knows Gansey is probably right, that Ronan probably just got separated from them and will arrive at the Pig at any moment. The smartest thing to do would be to wait here.

But all Adam seems to be able to think about is what might happen if they’re wrong. Once the storm is in full force, no one will be able to go out and look for Ronan. If they aren’t all back on the ship and in the air in a couple of hours…

He pulls his thoughts away. There’s no point in dwelling on disaster before it arrives, only in trying to avert it. He starts pulling on his suit again.

Gansey looks like he’s about to protest, but Blue puts a hand on his arm, and he closes his mouth. Adam tries not to think about that gesture, about the way Blue is looking at him, worry and knowledge in her eyes.

Is he so obvious? Maybe not to anyone else. Gansey is oblivious, if charmingly so. Noah, like most AI, often has trouble understanding the intricacies of human emotions. Ronan - well, Ronan is the man in question, and if Blue has realized what Adam has never put into words, then he supposes he shouldn’t be too surprised.

They spend a fair amount of time together. Ronan is an asshole, but he makes Adam laugh. Adam is an asshole, but he helps Ronan forget all the things weighing on him.

They’ve never done anything about it, beyond looking at each other longer than they should, beyond a few presents appearing in Adam’s bunk, beyond Adam seeming to know just when Ronan needs a distraction.

_Ronan’s not so bad._

Adam’s chest feels tight at the thought of never seeing his sharp smile again.

“I’ll be back,” he says uselessly, and puts his mask on. Gansey and Blue don’t stop him.

The airlock deposits him on the surface of the planet, all rock and dirt, barren and unwelcoming. What did they think they would find here, really? The wind whips around Adam, though it’s still not too bad, still nothing to worry about. It raises dust from the ground and makes it hard to see.

Adam taps his commlink. “Noah, is there any signal from Ronan’s suit?” Unless he activated the emergency signal, there probably won’t be, and even then Adam’s not sure they’d be able to pick it up. But he has to ask.

“I’m not getting anything. But here’s the map, okay?” Noah’s voice, too, has worry in it. He may not be human, but these things he understands. Adam’s wrist display lights up with the path Blue and Gansey took, the path Ronan should have been on.

“Thank you,” Adam says, and then he leans into the wind and starts walking.

He traces their path, peering into the wind, searching for Ronan’s tall figure. For any sign of him. Before long his radio fuzzes out, leaving him alone in the dim light, only the lights of his mask and the beacon on his wrist display keeping him company.

He knows he doesn’t have that long. If he doesn’t find Ronan pretty soon, they won’t be able to get back to the Pig in time to take off. He’ll have to head back and just hope they passed each other somehow, hope Ronan arrived minutes after Adam left and they’re all just laughing about what a dumb move it was to go out looking for him.

He doesn’t find Ronan. He does find Ronan’s footprint. It’s too big to be Gansey’s, much too big to be Blue’s, much too recent to be anyone else’s. It’s not quite on the path Blue and Gansey took - it seems like Ronan might have veered off track. Adam follows, of course.

The path takes him down a ravine, steep and a little dangerous. He finds a couple more footprints. He doesn’t find Ronan, and then he doesn’t find anything. He checks his wrist display, marks the path back, thinks about turning back. Takes a few more steps.

His radio fuzzes. He hears something, almost a voice.

“Ronan?” he says, and tries to pinpoint where the signal came from. It’s fruitless. He takes a few more steps, rounding some rocks.

The murder squash song blares over his radio. He winces. “Lynch, you asshole!”

Ronan’s laughter comes over the connection, mocking and alive and as annoying as ever. “Parrish. What are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you,” Adam says, and now that he’s found Ronan his worry begins to fade into annoyance. Even anger. “You didn’t come back with the others.”

“Yeah,” Ronan says, his voice still a little fuzzy. He’s nearby, he must be, but there’s still interference. “But come see what I found.”

There’s a light ahead now. Adam walks closer and sees the mouth of a cave, a thin slice in the rocks. He could easily have walked right by. The light at the entrance is Ronan’s flashlight, and Adam slips past it and through the entrance, a tight fit even for him. Ronan must have barely made it through.

Inside, there is light.

Adam stops, unable to do anything but stare. The inside of the cave is large, but he can see the other side - because there are lights hanging in the trees. There are _trees_ , and how is that possible? There’s grass beneath his feet, wildflowers nestled tenaciously in clumps along what should be the cave floor but isn’t. There’s a ceiling of rock overhead, they _are_ still underground, but -

But this is impossible. It’s not lights in the trees, it’s fireflies and bioluminescent moss and flowers that glow. It casts the cave in beautiful dim light, enough to see by even without the lamp attached to his mask. It’s impossible, all of it. How can this exist on a world like this? It’s like magic, but he knows that can’t be the case. It’s science, but science that he has no hope of understanding.

Ronan is there, coming toward him, and Adam is caught up in the grip of too many emotions. Wonder at this place he has found himself in, relief that Ronan is all right, the knowledge that Ronan has found something incredible. Because of that, it takes him a moment to figure out what’s off about Ronan - and then he does, all of a sudden.

“Your mask,” he says, looking around frantically for the oxygen that should be keeping Ronan alive.

“It’s fine, Parrish. I can breathe. Take yours off.” Ronan’s eyes are shining with the same wonder that Adam feels. This impossible place.

Adam thinks it sounds ridiculous. He knows it shouldn’t be safe. But there Ronan is, as alive as ever, and Adam finds himself removing his own mask before he can convince himself it’s a terrible idea.

And it’s true. He can breathe.

The air is sweet and clear, thick with the scent of growing things, something Adam has so rarely gotten a chance to breathe in. He tucks his mask into its holder at his belt, and he finds himself smiling, easy and honest in a way he is so rarely allowed.

He can feel Ronan’s eyes on him, and that’s a different kind of thrill, but he doesn’t let himself get distracted. He walks to one of the trees, strips his glove off and lays on a hand on the bark. It’s real, living, growing ever-so-slowly beneath his hand. There’s a glowing blossom hanging from a branch above, and when Adam touches it its petals curl, a glimmer of light runs along its edges. He takes a breath, indrawn, unable to quite process all of this.

“How’d you find this place?” he says.

“I dreamed about it,” Ronan says, and his voice sounds more alive now that Adam isn’t hearing it through the speakers and the radio and the static. He doesn’t sound ashamed of his answer, despite the fact that it’s blatantly ridiculous. “A week or two ago. I figured it was just a dumb dream, but then when we were coming back to the ship I saw - well, I saw that ravine, the one that goes down here, and I remembered seeing it in the dream. So.” He shrugs, as if that explains everything.

“So you followed it without telling Gansey or Blue, even though a storm was coming, even though something could have happened to you?” Adam’s annoyance cuts through his wonder, and he turns to face Ronan. Now that he knows Ronan’s all right, his fear can be replaced with anger.

“Nothing did happen to me,” Ronan says, unbothered by Adam’s anger. He never is, not when Adam wants him to be, even though he burns hotter than anyone most of the time. Adam is convinced he does it on purpose, to be as annoying as possible. To get under Adam’s skin.

Which is ridiculous. Ronan has been under his skin for months.

Ronan grins, sly and just on the edge of mocking. “Why, Parrish? You worried?”

Adam is about to snap at him, to throw sharp words, to lob a bomb that might actually turn this into a fight, but a tiny vine curls around his finger where it rests against the trunk of the tree, and his anger fades away.

How can he stay angry in the face of something like this?

“Yeah. I was worried,” he says, and for a moment Ronan doesn’t seem to know what to say. Adam’s voice was too honest, his words too simple.

_Of course I was worried._

He could make a mocking comment in return, he could ease away the truth of the moment and bring them back to steady ground, but he doesn’t. He lets his hand fall from the tree, and he watches Ronan. He doesn’t know what he is hoping for, but he is hoping.

Ronan makes a decision, in that instant. He steps forward, closing the space between them, and then he leans in and kisses Adam.

It’s sudden and inevitable. Every step they took, every word they spoke to each other over the past few months was leading to this, and maybe they both know that, maybe they both knew all it would take was one simple miracle to bring them together. Where they’ve both wanted to be for months.

The kiss only lasts for a moment, but it shakes Adam to his bones. When Ronan pulls back, there’s a question in his eyes, uncertainty, as if now that he’s done this he’s not sure it was welcome, was wanted.

Adam is not in the mood for that kind of nonsense.

He reaches out, slips a hand around the back of Ronan’s neck, and tugs him in, stretching up just a little to bridge the bare inches of difference in their heights. He kisses Ronan this time, and he’s never been so sure of anything. He tries to put that in his kiss, in the way his fingers rest on Ronan’s skin, and when he feels Ronan’s hands grip his waist he thinks he’s succeeded.

He leans back against the tree so the branches fall around them, the dim light sharpening the handsome lines of Ronan’s faces, the bright flowers like stars above them. They kiss again, and again, and again.

They pull apart finally, to breathe. It’s hard to tell in this light, but Adam thinks Ronan is flushed, and he knows he is. He can feel the beginning of something when their eyes meet, in the curve of Ronan’s lips and the steady certainty of his gaze.

They’ll have to talk about it eventually, maybe. Or maybe Adam will just move into Ronan’s bunk when they get back, and that will be that. But for now -

“We have to get back to the Pig,” Adam says. He can hear the reluctance in his own voice. He wants to stay here, in this beautiful impossibility of a cave - of a forest? - with Ronan, and learn everything about the planes of his body. But the storm is rising, and they don’t have much time, and most of all, they have to tell Gansey about this.

It must be connected to Glendower’s visit here. It must be what they were looking for. He’ll be delighted, overjoyed. They’ll come back. Again and again, probably, all of them.

“I guess,” Ronan says, sharing Adam’s reluctance, but then he smiles. “Can’t wait to see the look on Dick’s face.”

Adam does not ask if Ronan is referring to the cave or to them - whatever they are now. Both, probably. He just reaches out, pulling Ronan to him for one last kiss. Then they’re both putting their masks on, slipping hands into gloves, and stopping at the cave entrance for one last look at the alien forest Ronan has found.

In a dream.

 _He’s incredible_ , Adam thinks, and lets himself imagine a future filled with Ronan’s impossibilities.

He likes the thought.


End file.
